The present invention relates generally to weather detection and reporting; and more particularly to a computerized system for detecting weather information at multiple sites, and for communicating that information to multiple end users.
The National Weather Service maintains a network of radar installations in the United States. Based upon information gleaned from the radar, observers at these stations provide hourly teletyped messages which are disseminated to subscribers.
In addition, the National Weather Service employs Weather Bureau Radar Remote (WBRR) equipment designed to provide annotated plan position indicator display at locations remote from the radar sites. Here, a camera scans a high persistency slave display of the radar picture at a slow rate so that the generated information bits can be transmitted over the telephone lines. With this system, it is possible to dial up any one of the remote sites and obtain a transmission of the radar picture information from the remote site. More complete information concerning the National Weather Service system is available in a publication entitled "Introduction to Weather Radar" published in August 1979 by the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
More detailed weather information can be obtained from the WBRR radar with the National Weather Service Digital Video Integrator and Processor (D-VIP), which automatically processes the output of the radar to produce up to six levels of intensity data corresponding to preselected categories of estimated rainfall rates which, in turn, may be displayed and disseminated as described above.
Improvements on the WBRR system are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,347,618, "Apparatus For Processing Weather Radar Information", Aug. 31, 1982 to Kavouras et al., where a transmitter adapted to receive radar data from the National Weather Service radar network is used to process the data into a four-range radar image and to append geographical overlay information for transmission over voice grade phone lines to remote receivers. In the receivers, the data from the phone lines is demodulated and stored into predetermined memory locations corresponding to the four range categories from which the radar data had originally been acquired. Once stored, the individual ranges can be individually selected for display in a six color format representing the six levels of D-VIP intensity data.
The foregoing systems collect essentially only a single weather parameter, namely precipitation. In addition, there is considerable delay between the time the system commences collecting data, and the time that data is displayed to the end user.
Other weather data detection and display systems employ multiple weather data sensors including an anemometer, temperature sensor, rain collector, and/or humidity sensor to detect multiple weather parameters. In a basic system, the weather sensors are connected to a display box containing an analog to digital converter. The display box receives analog weather data from the weather sensors and displays current numerical readings of the data in digital format. In an expanded system, the display box is coupled to an interface modem containing dynamic random access memory (RAM). The interface modem is coupled to a microprocessor based computer programmed to display graphical readings of the data. In this expanded system, incoming weather data is automatically stored in RAM. The system includes sufficient RAM to store approximately 24 hours worth of data. Once all memory is consumed, new data displaces old data. To collect continuous weather data for multiple days, the operator manually downloads weather data from the interface modem to the computer hard disk on a daily basis. One supplier of such systems is Davis Instruments Corp. of Hayward, Calif., which offers Weather Monitor II .TM. display box, and Weatherlink .TM. interface modem and software.